It was beginning to snow again, big, soft flakes, and the wind, skimming the drifts, speedily filled the broad, light rings Tisdale left in his wake.  A passenger with a baby in his arms stood on the observation platform, and the child held out its mittened hands to him, crowing, with little springs.  They had formed an acquaintance during the delay in the Rockies, which had grown to intimacy in the Cascades, and Hollis slipped the carrying strap of his bag over his shoulder and stopped to toss him a snowball, before he turned from the track.  “Good-by, Joey,” he said.  “I am coming back for you if there’s a chance.”

The operator, shivering, closed the door.  “Never saw such a man,” he commented.  “But if he’s lived in Alaska, a Cascade blizzard would just be a light breeze to him.”  He paused to put a huge stick of wood in the stove, then, after the habit of solitary humanity, resumed his soliloquy.  “I bet he’s seen life.  I bet, whoever he is, he’s somewheres near the top of the ladder.  I bet, in a bunch of men, he does the thinking.  And I bet what he wants, I don’t care what’s piled in his way, he gets.”

As he descended, the trees closed behind Tisdale, rank on rank, and were enveloped in the swaying curtain of the snow.  Always a certain number surrounded him; they seemed to march with him like a bodyguard.  But he was oblivious of the peril that from the higher peak had appeared so imminent to Lucky Banks.  When the snow-cloud lifted, the Pass was still completely veiled from him, and the peak the prospector’s party had ascended was then cut off by the intervening ridge.  He had crossed the headwaters and was working along this slope down the watercourse, when the noise of the first avalanche startled the gorge.  A little later a far shout came to his quick ear.  He answered, but when another call reached him from a different point, high up beyond the ridge, he was silent.  He knew a company, separated in the neighborhood of the slide, was trying to get into communication.  Then, in the interval that he waited, listening, began the ominous roar of the mightier cataclysm.  The mountain he had descended seemed to heave; its front gave way; the ridge on which he stood trembled at the concussion.

Instantly, before the clamor ceased and the first cries reached him, Tisdale knew what had occurred.  His sense of location told him.  Then the fact was pressed on him that some on the unfortunate train still survived.  He saw that the course he had taken from the west portal was no longer possible, but by keeping the curve of the ridge which joined the mountain slope and formed the top of the gorge, and by working upward, he should be able to gain the upper edge of the slide where rose the human sounds.  He took this way.  His shoulder, turned a little, met the lower boughs with the dip and push of the practiced woodsman, and even on the up-grade the distance fell behind him swiftly.  Always subconsciously, as he moved, he saw that baby crowing him a good-by, and the young father smiling Godspeed from the observation platform; sometimes the girl mother with tender brown eyes watched him from the background.  Suppose their coach, which had directly preceded the observation car, had escaped; the snow-cloud, parting on the mountain top, showed that the roofs of the station still remained.